A lawyer who once worked for Michael Cohen accused him on Wednesday of perjuring himself during his testimony this week in former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial.
Bob Costello, a longtime criminal defense attorney, told Congress that when Cohen took the stand on Tuesday and accused Costello of pressuring him to stay quiet about Trump in 2018, he was lying.
“I read Michael Cohen’s testimony from yesterday’s trial in New York on the way down on the train, and virtually every statement he made about me is another lie,” Costello said.
Costello’s remarks came during a House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing, during which he described his experience representing Cohen for a couple of months beginning in April 2018, when they first met, while the Department of Justice was investigating Cohen.
A few months later, in August 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to several crimes, including tax evasion, lying to a bank, and campaign finance violations.
Costello said Cohen appeared desperate to find a way to avoid jail.
“I will do whatever the F I have to do. I will never spend one day in jail,” Costello recalled Cohen saying repeatedly during their first meeting at the Loews Regency Hotel in Manhattan.
Costello said Cohen was frantically seeking an “escape route” and had even admitted to contemplating jumping off the roof of the hotel two nights prior.
Costello said he advised Cohen to bring any damning information he had about Trump forward to the U.S. attorney’s office in New York and that this could help Cohen stay out of jail. However, Cohen replied that he had no evidence against Trump.
“I swear to God, Bob, I don’t have anything on Donald Trump. … I don’t have anything on Donald Trump,” Costello recalled Cohen saying multiple times.
Cohen, Trump’s onetime fixer, was eventually sentenced to three years in prison for his crimes. As part of his plea deal, Cohen admitted to paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016 to help Trump’s election prospects. Daniels had been threatening to go public with a claim that she had a sexual encounter with Trump 10 years prior.
Trump was never prosecuted by the DOJ over the matter, but Bragg brought charges against Trump several years later, alleging that Trump conspired with Cohen to issue the payment and then tried to hide it. Cohen, who flipped his position and became openly resentful toward Trump, is now Bragg’s star witness in the case and has spent the past two days testifying against Trump in the trial.
Although Bragg has relied on Cohen to deliver the most direct account to the jury of how Trump was allegedly in on the Daniels payment, Cohen’s credibility has long been a glaring concern for Bragg.
Costello told Congress that after Cohen had changed tunes and begun publicly implicating Trump, Costello tried to warn Bragg’s office that Cohen was an “inveterate liar.” Bragg, however, showed a lack of interest in hearing Costello’s story, he said.
Costello said that when he was questioned by Bragg’s grand jury, the prosecutors “did everything in their power not to ask me the questions that would elicit the exculpatory information.”
Costello said he also gave the same information to Trump’s defense team, signaling Trump’s attorneys could at some point call Costello to the witness stand in the trial.
Cohen’s testimony earlier this week contradicted what Costello told the House committee under oath on Wednesday.
Cohen accused Costello of dangling a pardon in front of him in 2018 as a “pressure campaign” to prevent him from snitching on Trump. Costello, who was in regular communication with Trump’s then-counsel Rudy Giuliani, painted himself as a “back channel” to Trump while Cohen was facing the prospect of prison, Cohen said.
Prosecutors submitted evidence in Trump’s trial that they said bolstered Cohen’s claims.
“I am sure you saw the news that Rudy is joining the Trump legal team. I told you my relationship with Rudy, which could be very, very useful for you,” Costello wrote in an email to Cohen on April 19, 2018.
Cohen testified that he perceived Costello’s communication to mean, “Don’t flip. Don’t speak. Don’t cooperate.”
“There was something really sketchy and wrong about him,” Cohen said of Costello.
Costello has been an attorney for five decades and once worked in the U.S. attorney’s office in New York. Costello told Congress he was able to speak about his conversations with Cohen because Cohen waived attorney-client privilege. The New York Times reported that Costello worked in an informal, unpaid capacity for Cohen.
Costello indicated he had a wealth of evidence to corroborate his side of the story and that Cohen was presenting a misleading narrative.
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“He picks out, cherry-picks certain emails or text messages and tries to make them look like something else,” Costello said.
Cohen is expected to finish testifying in Trump’s trial on Thursday.
